All posts tagged ‘Laptop’

Backpacks are a staple of geek culture. Whether you use one for carrying all your gear to and from work or for picking up swag at a con, chances are good you’ve got an old backpack in your closet. I love the backpack I have, but Ogio asked me if I wanted to try out their new Renegade RSS backpack and I just couldn’t say no. Ogio makes great bags for all purposes, but the Renegade RSS is the Cadillac of their backpack line, loaded with features, well constructed, and ideal for the geek lifestyle.

Like several of their backpacks, the Renegade RSS has a number of pockets that use “red protection”. These pockets, identified by a red lining, provide extra protection, whether padding or a hard plastic enclosure, to keep valuables safe.

In the Renegade, there is a crush-proof vault at the top, perfect for sunglasses or any item you want to keep extra safe. Along the back is a “reactive suspension system” (the RSS in the model name) for laptops up to 17″ in size. With reinforced walls and an absorption system, your laptop will be protected if you drop the bag.

There are also special pockets for cameras, phones, tablets/readers, electric chargers, and more. Each compartment is identified inside the pocket by an icon that shows you what item is recommended to be placed inside. The bag weighs in at almost three and a half pounds, which is heavier than a lot of bags, but the protection and piece of mind this weight provides is worth it.

To put the bag to the test, I stuffed clothes, a tablet, a camera, phone, toiletries, and everything else I’d need for a couple days in Austin for SXSW. The Renegade RSS was comfortable and up to the test; although the dense foam against my back didn’t do me any favors when the temperatures approached the 90 degree mark. Still, I was impressed that I had enough room for all my stuff and still had space to pack away some swag.

Pockets for important devices like your phone are easily accessible by sliding the pack onto one arm and there’s even a small, zippered pouch on the shoulder strap for little items like a key, a pen, or other small item you might need to get to quickly. On top of all that, the Renegade RSS comes with a limited lifetime warranty on materials and workmanship, important for a bag that gets a lot of use and abuse.

The Renegade RSS is available in black and retails for $150.Disclosure: GeekDad received a sample of this product.

Looking for a great backpack for your high school or college age kid, or something stylish and functional for urban commuting? There are plenty of cheap backpacks out there, but most of these suffer from a few key flaws: heavy weight and bulk, poor fit, poor use of space and they are often just plain ugly. I few years back, I tried out a Wise-Walker backpack from Nomadic, a Japanese company that’s built a reputation for making extremely compact, high quality bags and packs of all sorts. While the version I tried proved ideal for day trips and travel (with a vast array of compartments and pockets), the one thing it was lacking was room for a full-sized laptop. JetPens — purveyor of a wide range of cool Japanese pens, bags and office supplies — sent me a new Nomadic Wise Walker WL-25 backpack, a model designed to address this requirement, making a good thing even more useful. Continue Reading “The Wise Walker WL-25 is A Better Backpack for Back-to-School” »

How many geeky dads and geeky moms want to play their favorite game when they are on the go, instead of waiting to get back to their home PC? But you need a hefty machine that can deal with running games that can be very demanding on your CPU and GPU. This is at least one good reason I wanted to check out the relatively new MSI GT783 portable gaming laptop for GeekDad.

I decided to have the MSI GT783 run the gauntlet Game of Thrones–style, to see how this gaming machine would perform playing Minecraft on an MP server with a fairly complex world environment. I installed 64-bit IE9 (the O/S is 64-bit Windows 7) and 64-bit Java, (recommended anyway by Mojang to handle the “Far” setting on the render distance) We’ll start by looking at the technical specs of the unit and then make our way through the hardware features plus check out my impressions of its performance. Continue Reading “MSI Takes on Minecraft” »

I do a lot of traveling to conferences and for business, and often need to carry multiple laptops, iPads, and books. A strong, rugged bag is a necessity for me when I travel, and if I can find one that is both professional looking and stylish, that’s all the better. But most of the bags I find are glorified messenger bags: rugged, but making me look like I just stepped off the sidewalk from a ten mile bike ride rather than going to a meeting with top executives. I’ve been seeking something more businesslike, but not too corporate. I want to look professionally geeky.

I think I found the answer.

A few weeks ago, Kolobags sent me their Zeyner Bullfight laptop briefcase to test out, and it is, without doubt, the nicest bag I’ve ever had. It is at once a professional looking laptop bag but with a remarkable devilish style. This is a true road warrior’s bag. In fact there is a tire tread motif imprinted in the rubber guards at the corners and flame stitching on the side pocket. The handle is wrapped in leather with red stitching and curved chrome spike on either end, looking like something Conan (and I’m not talking about O’Brien) might use to disembowel an attacking army. The handle along with the red flame stitching on the side will leave no doubt as to your attitude.

Zeyner Bullfight Laptop Briefcase made from ballistic nylon

The construction is equally solid, made of ballistic nylon and heavy chrome accents and zippers. There are three main pockets, including a roomy side equipment pouch, an accordion folder, and the main section which has a removable laptop slip cover built in. Its dimensions — 17.5″ x 15.5″ x 6.0″ — make it a bit bulky, especially when I have to travel on a crowded Metro train. However, for trips, it can carry my work MacBook Pro, my personal MacBook Air, an iPod, a few copies of my latest book, all the cables I need, plus a few magazines for reading with room left to spare. All of this does not come cheap, costing $335 online.

Although it certainly made an impression when I pulled my PowerBook out to set up for my presentation at the recent eDui conference, this bag is generally larger and heavier than what I typically carry with me on a daily basis. These days, though, my goal is to travel as virtually as possible leaving the weight of physical materials behind, and carrying all of my reading materials on my iPad. However, I see a lot of other professionals who like to carry their office with them wherever they go, and this briefcase would be an ideal way to transport it.

Fortunately, Zeyner also sells a variety of different and equally stylish laptop bags of various sizes and weights through Kolobags. This one I would really like for daily use is he Zyner Rebellion messenger bag, leather with some piratey looking metallic details. Maybe it’s time for me to get that bike after all.

Lately I’ve been using the G-Form Extreme Sleeve laptop case that I received as a sample. I admit I was interested mainly because of the case’s cool appearance: The exterior looks tough, covered in rubber plates giving it a unique “Death Star” style that is likely to polarize viewers on whether it’s cool or too much — I’m firmly in the former camp! Whereas my wife hated and refuses to use it. (But then, she doesn’t like my Voltron skin either, so go figure.)

Having received the case, I tried it out. It fit perfectly for my MacBook Pro, but I wondered whether a thicker laptop would be compatible. The site claims that the flexible nature of the sleeve permits multiple thicknesses of lappy, but it’s hard to believe that some 1″ clunker could be squeezed in.

Sometimes lessons in economics and the harsh reality of toiling away as one of many cogs in the great machine is enough to create that rare spark of entrepreneurship (even more rare when successful). This is exactly what happened to Richard Cary, Hector Penton and Kevin Wasielewski, three co-workers and friends who were working for Alienware, when it was bought out by Dell. They stuck around for two years, hopeful that perhaps Dell wouldn’t ruin the company. This might have been helped by Michael Dell visiting the factory in Miami and telling the entire Alienware company that nothing was going to change and no jobs would be lost. A couple years later, the factory was shut down, the employees were laid off and Alienware manufacturing was moved to Mexico and China. By that time Richard, Hector and Kevin had already left, unhappy with what Dell was doing to the company. They didn’t want to make PC’s based on proprietary parts, that didn’t come with the best support, technology and highest performance. So they started their own company.

At Origin PC, Kevin (now CEO of Origin PC) told me that he routinely interviews ex-Alienware (or Dellienware as he calls it) employees looking for a job. It’s pretty clear that not everyone can just up and start their own PC company, but Origin just doesn’t have the jobs at this point. They are a small shop, with a dedicated staff paying personal attention to every high quality computer that gets ordered. However, they are growing, so there is hope. In a market flooded with cheap computers, tablet PC’s and other devices that are taking market share away from not-so-cheap gaming PC’s it’s tough to compete. However, after collecting over 15 awards in the past two years including CNET Editors’ Choice, Maximum PC Kick Ass, PCGamer Editors’c Choice, A- Better Business Bureau, and winning the CPU Dream PC competition two years straight Origin seems to be doing pretty well. But it’s not all about awards, it’s about delivering a quality product to the market. Continue Reading “Gaming in the 3rd Dimension With Origin PC” »

The XO laptop made a considerable splash when it was announced to the world by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organization. Tech enthusiasts were anxious to get their hands on the fabled $100 laptop. Reviews at the time were very enthusiastic and focused mostly on the hardware, ruggedness, battery life, innovative display technology and mesh wireless access. The software however was a custom linux distribution with an entirely new user interface and an entirely new way of doing things. Some tried to compare it to Windows or linux running on similarly inexpensive Netbooks, and those reviews were unfavorable. But with two years under it’s belt since development laptops started shipping, OLPC has made considerable progress in realizing their vision. Let’s see what the XO-1 laptop can do today and what the OLPC organization has accomplished.